


the world is no longer mysterious.

by cambion



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 16:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7060153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cambion/pseuds/cambion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers learns how to grieve in the winter of 1924, and then 1935, and then 1942, and 1943, and 1944 and -</p>
            </blockquote>





	the world is no longer mysterious.

**Author's Note:**

> this, was going to be a really long fic, but honestly i've moved on to writing something and don't think i'll ever touch it again! i felt like the first chapter worked as a oneshot, so that's how i'm keeping it up. hopefully you'll be seeing a different fic from me soon!
> 
> trigger warnings for canon typical triggers. also fairly graphic references to suicide and domestic violence early on.

Steve Rogers learns how to grieve in the winter of 1924. 

Looking back it’ll be harder - he won’t know how to make peace with the sadness he feels at the loss of his father and the relief it seems to bring his mother, how she never bleeds anymore. But in 1924, he’s six years old, and he cries like any six year old learning to face death should. In the future he’ll read a book about children grieving, about how that young they don’t truly understand what’s happening. He’ll think it’s bullshit, because with the way he finds his father, purple-faced and red-throated, hanging in the bathroom, there’s no question what death is and what death means. (He pretends he never found the note that explained how Joseph died to no longer burden Sarah, pretends he doesn’t hear his mom cry harder over the note than she did over his body).

He follows his mom’s example, and after that first day, he doesn’t cry. Around other people, he doesn’t cry. “Just do what I’ve told you, Stevie,” she tells him, smoothing his hair back. “We don’t stay down, you hear? We always get back up.” Steve gets back up, helps his mom around the house when she takes on more hours at the hospital. It’s like Joseph Rogers was never there. He thinks pretending that way must help his mom, so he does too, but Steve’s no good at pretend and he feels the absence like there’s a hole in himself.

He grieves again when he’s seventeen years old and it’s worse, now. As a child, he’d thought he’d loved his father, because he was his dad and that was what you did. But now, he can see that there was some relief in the loss, the same way Sarah seemed to breathe a bit easier in his passing. He knows because there’s no relief when Sarah is gone. There’s an ache in him he can’t sleep off, can’t scrub off, can’t cry out of him. He cries the first day and then he doesn’t cry again, doesn’t cry in front of anyone.

“I can make it on my own, Buck,” he says, and he’s playing pretend. He’s terrified, absolutely terrified, and he’s never felt so completely alone. He’s lost at sea, a lone body bobbing in the endless expanse of the ocean. His limbs flail but he’s too weak, too small, always too small, and there’s nothing to hold him down.

A firm hand on his shoulder, a slanted grin, “The thing is, you don’t have to.” He’s still lost at sea, but he thinks maybe there’s a light on the horizon, a lighthouse calling him to harbor. “I’m with you, ‘til the end of the line,” the lighthouse breathes and all Steve can think is  _ ‘Thank god for you, Buck, oh thank god’ _ .

The war brings more grief and it’s like a flipbook Steve had once tried to make back at home. (It was of a bird, flying across the pages, and he’d been so thrilled to show Bucky when he got it to work. Bucky had gasped, all genuine pride and amazement, and Steve felt whole). The grief flies by, page after page, never giving Steve a chance to stop, take a breath, really appreciate the bodies falling around him. Just the big picture, just the aching sorrow of souls flying away with no individual page to attach it to.

And then Bucky. The lighthouse is out, and Steve is drowning. This time his loss of control feels less like wading through water, though, and more like falling through open air, hands grasping for purchase but finding nothing, nothing. The snow is falling and the ground is so far and unlike Bucky, he never hits the ground.

Soon he finds himself actually falling, in the form of a plane on a suicide mission, and he begins to grieve for himself, for the loss of his future, for everything. He hits the ground.

And Steve lives.

 

* * *

The Soldier stumbles into the world with new eyes and new hands.

It's as if he's seeing for the first time, truly  _ seeing  _ \- not just assessing, processing, filing, continuing, erasing. The sky is  _ so _ bright, and it occurs to him that very few of his remaining memories include the light of day. It occurs to him that maybe that matters to him, now, in a way it didn't before.

A part of him feels as if it's mourning all the times his eyes weren't looking at the big, blue sky and how it takes over everything in view. A part of him thinks there's a reason looking at it hurts beyond the weakness of his eyes.

Seeing isn't necessarily understanding, but he's trying. He takes in everything he can - the harsh flash of sirens, the scurrying of people in a city torn apart. He's no longer looking at the man from the river, but his mind sees what his eyes don't. He wonders if he should've taken the man farther from the river. He wonders if he should've left him to drown. There are more sirens and he has to tear his eyes from them to keep moving.

His hands are the hands of something, some _ one _ , other than a well-oiled machine. He hesitates when he reaches for his weapons, finding that the touch of them makes him sick (the cruel irony being that his hand itself is a weapon, is meant for blood and devastation as much as the many firearms on his person; the cruel irony being that he himself is far more a weapon than any knife or gun or bomb).  It's good no one's looking for him, at least not yet. They seem to be more concerned with survivors of the innocent variety than the guilty. Justice is rarely outweighed by compassion, but fate is kind today.

His new eyes are almost too overwhelmed to assess where to meet his needs, but he focuses just enough. In all the chaos, storefronts have been abandoned, and he's nothing if not precise on a good day. Today is not a good day, but he manages. He leaves the stores with a full outfit, some food, a backpack, and having only been caught by three security cameras in the process. He considers the mission a success.

_ Mission _ \- his stomach turns, the overwhelming desire to follow through and succeed and report coursing through him. He ignores it. He knows when a mission has failed and when there is nothing of it to report.

 

* * *

He tries to report back anyway, a war of desires raging inside him that he can neither win nor lose. Even if he returns to his handlers of his own will, compliant soldier following orders as best he can, he will only be laying himself at the gates of Hell. A foolish part of him hopes for mercy nonetheless, naively believes he will find mercy with HYDRA before anyone else.

None of it matters when he finds that Alexander Pierce's home is a crime scene, surrounded by a couple dozen cop cars, flashing rapid and bright, as well as many unmarked, likely federal vehicles. In all the chaos, it seems like hardly this many officials could be spared for the sake of the single body bag on the lawn (Renata, he thinks - the woman who saw too much with eyes too understanding and paid with her life for it. The Soldier understands that seeing is as much a crime to HYDRA as telling).

No, they aren’t here for one civilian loss, however innocent she may have been. They're here because Pierce is dead or captured. They're here because he lost. They're here to clean up his mess. 

The Soldier knows when there is no one to report back to.

* * *

The Soldier returns to the HYDRA lab with death on his mind and murder in his eyes. They made him a weapon, they took his eyes and his hands, and now that he has them back he plans to let them see what their handiwork has accomplished. Their leader is gone, they have no recourse. They have resources he can take, but more than that they have blood he can spill. It’s been a long day, and he is nothing if not a soldier.

He recognizes these scientists, he realizes, and wonders if this level of recognition was planned. Recognition was never allowed, and whenever it occurred his mind was returned to its blank state. Maybe it was a mistake in his  _ programming _ (he feels peaceful acceptance and absolute horror at once) that simply never caused enough issue to need fixed. Maybe his mind is a dam, and the floodgates are opening however slowly, recognition of faces being one of the first steps. Even knowing he’s not meant to recognize others, he thinks, seems like a sign he’s remembering things he shouldn’t.

It doesn’t matter. These scientists, they’re the hands that place the guard between his teeth, that strap him to the chair, that make reports of his recognition to Pierce. He recognizes them, and they’ve done enough. He takes one’s neck between his hands and he --

The nausea of touching his weapons is back, and he can see a man from years ago, begging for his life. It’s vague and blurred, like a memory, but it’s all he sees, his vision of the scientist gone. Now between his hands there’s a child, weeping, and there’s blood pouring over his gloved hands. Another now, a woman, the pressure pushing her eyes just barely out of her sockets, total fear in them. He smells smoke, gasoline, blood, hears “Oh god  _ please _ , please, I’ll do what you want any-- thi--”

The scientist’s body falls to the floor, and he expects it to be limp like a ragdoll. He feels thankful  _ relief _ and outstanding  _ horror _ at once when the body heaves, gasping for breath, pleading, “Thank you, thank you, oh god--” before the other scientist says, bitterly (stupidly), “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

The Soldier destroys every non-living thing in the facility, and finds he can’t lay even a hand more on a single living one. Thankful, terrified,  _ thankful _ \--

* * *

The Soldier dumps every weapon that is not bound to him by flesh and blood into the river, far from where he left Captain America, but of the same water. There's something poetic about that, something that he can't quite word but thinks maybe there was a time when he could've. Taking something good and possibly peaceful from the water, and giving instruments of destruction back to it.

It's careless, he knows, but he's more shaken by how careless he was to even try to report back, by how careless he’d been when letting all those people go. He is a weapon and he nearly offered himself back to his handlers on a silver platter. He is a weapon who can’t even kill without orders. He's tired of weapons. (If he can’t be aimed at the right target, he thinks, neither should any of his.)

Fear twists itself deep in his gut as he watches the guns sink and the knives float away, but he knows they’re useless to him now.

(The Soldier winds down the river, towards the chaos, towards the pandemonium, and he finds the spot he left the Captain empty. He can still see him behind his eyes.)

* * *

 

The Soldier has a name. 

_ Names are useless _ , something inside him says.  _ Names are sentimentality and sentimentality is weakness _ .  _ Titles are all someone needs, and sometimes, not even that.  _ It sounds like a quote in his mind, a voice he can't quite place but knows isn't his own. It's not a memory he spends time on.

Here, here he's surrounded by memories. He wanted to know more about the Captain, about his mission, because what else is there now, but a list of finished missions and one unfinished? His mission is null but there’s nothing left, so he sought more. And, conveniently, there was a goddamn  _ museum _ on display about just that. There's plenty about him here - about Steve Rogers, the man and the myth, risen from the sea like a national messiah. But what the Soldier didn't expect was plenty about  _ him _ \- the man and the myth, risen in the shadows where no one had seen. The information feels wrong, the way a mission report sounds when echoed through five different operatives instead of directly from the source. But he knows they're not untrue and that deep certainty terrifies him. There's no memory in him of internal certainty, only the certainty brought by orders, and he finds himself overwhelmed by it.

He has a name and the name was taken from him. The name is useless, but it's  _ not _ , it's his and maybe the act of owning something is use enough. Or maybe possessions are part of weakness, more sentimentality. Sentimentality is why Steve Rogers fell from the helicarrier, why his body was broken and beaten. Sentimentality is why the Soldier took Steve Rogers from the river. Maybe sentimentality is weakness in you, but strength from someone else.

His name is James Buchanan Barnes, but his friends called him Bucky.

* * *

 

And Steve grieves.

It’s hard to grieve for someone who isn’t dead. He learns this first with Peggy, and when he sees her she is so  _ alive _ \- elderly, yes, barely hanging on, but alive and smiling at him with that same lopsided pout to her lips. But she’s a ghost too, her features faded and replaced, her color washed out and memories flickering in and out by the day. She’s a part of his past that’s been dragged into his future, lopsided and unfamiliar (he wonders if that’s how he looks to her).

He learns this second with Bucky, three years into grieving for his dead body (they never found the body, he’s an empty grave in a military graveyard, that until 2011 was next to an empty grave with Steve’s name on it). The grave is empty and his body is alive and he is staring at Steve and there is no recognition in his eyes and his hands aren’t right. They fight on the helicarrier and Steve thinks that he finally sees Bucky’s eyes on the Winter Soldier’s face, thinks he sees a boxer’s hands instead of an assassin’s.

He falls, smoke like snow, helicarrier like runaway train, hands lost with nothing to grab onto, nothing. He lands, the river surrounding him, lone body bobbing in the water. The lighthouse guides him to harbor.


End file.
